Plan B Forum

what makes a picture worth 450M dollars?

http://www.businessinsider.com/is-leona ... rb-2017-10

I admit that even though I had seen thousands of reproductions of La Gioconda and many more copies of many types I wept without shame to see the original for the first time. Which I never anticipated. It was a shock like seeing the south rim of the grand canyon for the first time.

So for me money is just money. Great art is timeless.

So what makes a picture worth 450M dollars? The poverty of the world without it.

yrs,
rubato

I was underwhelmed the first (and only) time I saw the Mona Lisa. I think the Leonardo in the Smithsonian is a better picture. I need a better word than 'better' there because at that level the difference is not in the technical merit but what it evokes in the viewer.

I actually think the Salvator Mundi is a pretty crap picture (obviously without having seen the original so it's based on very limited evidence). My biggest problem is the attribution- I don't think Leonardo with his knowledge of optics (he invented a lens grinding machine) would have painted that orb with no distortion of the image behind it.

ETA - National Gallery of Art not Smithsonian.

My top three pictures I have stood in front of

JMW Turner The Fighting Temeraire
Rembrandt Nightwatch
Salvador Dali Christ of St John on the Cross
I'd probably put Goya's The Maja Nude as #4, while aforementioned Leonardo is somewhere in the top 10.

I think someone got hosed. Mona is "obviously" Salvador in drag.

So what makes a picture worth 450M dollars?

The willingness of someone to pay 450 million dollars for it...

That's pretty much Econ 101...

Willing buyer and willing seller.

Andy, the Dali one is my number one. Until I saw this, the real one, I thought Dali was a good craftsman with a great marketing plan. But that one is--even the memory of standing in front of it leaves me speechless.

But this 450M in the news. It has been 'restored' so completely that I wonder just what is the source of the final artistry.

snailgate.

The deterrmination of price and the determination of value are different things.

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing."

Oscar Wilde


yrs,
rubato

My top three pictures I have stood in front of

JMW Turner The Fighting Temeraire
Rembrandt Nightwatch
Salvador Dali Christ of St John on the Cross
I'd probably put Goya's The Maja Nude as #4, while aforementioned Leonardo is somewhere in the top 10.

ex-khobar Andy

When you get to that level I can't make any sense out of rankings. Each is so powerful on its own that I can't tease out some objective scale to hold them against. And you interact with them in such different ways. For some you need to understand the history and context and for others it is more direct. But some of the greatest art I have seen in person, and it really is different: The Turners at the Tate Britain, esp "Sunrise with Sea Monsters", La Gioconde, The Van Goghs at the Dorsay, La Sagrada Familia (ok, in spite of what I just said, I would nominate this as the most amazing work of art from one mind in all of history, and yes I'm going back to see it when it is done.), the Jacques-Louis Davide paintings in the Louvre ( the Roman Polanski of his time, evil man, great artist).

Pictures I would like to see and will travel to do so: The Fighting Timeraire, The portrait of Adele Bauer-Bloch, any Da Vinci or Vermeer, any Cezanne.

yrs,
rubato

Ok, almost anything by Cezanne. Just look at the light of intelligence in his eye:



And again here. That same look of questioning and wondering. Are you there? Is that really you?:



yrs,
rubato

I have a very different list of great paintings I’ve stood in front of:

El Jaleo, at the Gardiner, by John Singer Sargent

The Monet water lily panels at L’Orangerie

Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, at the Uffizi

Jamie Wyeth, Orca Bates on Monhegan - this one is in private hands now but I saw it just after Jamie finished painting it, hanging still, wet, at the Farnsworth in Rockland Maine

There are of course many other wonderful pieces - but these are the ones that stirred me when I saw them, and left lasting impressions. And I agree, there are certain artists I would go see anywhere — And some great ones that I don’t care if I ever see again. I spent hours at the newish Picasso museum in Paris and while the building is spectacular and warm and the art displayed perfectly, the art itself left me cold.